It was with great excitement that I received notification that The Incidental Tourist had received a Best Travel Blog South Africa award at the SA Travel Blog Awards for 2016, as well as an inclusion on three of their Shortlists.

Named Winner of Most Seasoned Traveller, and included on the Shortlist for Best Photography, Best Content and overall Best Blog. Very proud and grateful for the encouragement, support and opportunities that you all constantly show me.

The SA Travel Blog Awards have been established to recognise Bloggers, connect bloggers with brands, and help raise awareness and funds towards their chosen charity. The founders understand the effort and great care it takes to write and maintain a Blog, as well as that without building enough recognition and education about our environment, we risk losing the beauty many destinations have.

How the Awards worked:

There were eight categories and each blog was judged to a score out of ten for each.

• Best Design – Layout, use of elements, colours and aesthetics.
• Best Photographic – Quantity, Quality and Creativity of Photographic Images.
• Best Content – Use of Language, Grammar and depth of information
• Best Social Media – Metrics like total shares, comments and social media engagement.
• Best Lifestyle Blog – Most Variety of topics such as food, wine, weekend activities and day to day tips and advice which also has a high rating for content.
• Newcomer of the Year – The best overall blog “younger” than 18 months with high ratings on content, design and Social Media.
• Most Seasoned Traveller – Number of destinations reviewed and variety of destinations reviewed as well as having good design, good content and good social media.
• Best Overall – The blog with the highest overall rating between design, content, photography and social media.

Learn more about this year’s Judges here. My Congratulations to the Winners in the various categories as below, connect with them all to be inspired:

What makes me particularly proud of my win and shortlisting, is that #SATBA2016 had collaborative blogs with many contributors, up against individual blogs, curated, written and promoted by just one person only. To see the small independent blogs holding their own against the bigger ones, given limited manpower and budget, is really encouraging. Thank you for recognising the work that we all do. Here’s to all the wonderful bloggers out there who are dedicated to bringing their discoveries from the world to us.

Thank you to the generous sponsors of my prizes, a beautiful cream Demsey hard suitcase with compartments which I adore and will be using a great deal, power pack from Sun International to help keep me connected and a wine tasting and meal at the beautiful Holden Manz Estate in Franschhoek.

And then a later addition to the above, a Tom Tom GPS Bandit Action Cam has been delivered and I can’t wait to try it out.

The awards were held in Cape Town on 18 June 2016, and included a workshop, lunch and cocktail party. To find out more information on the SA Travel Blog Awards or to enter next year, please visit www.travelblogawards.co.za.

The Travel Blog Awards were held at the Table Bay Hotel, which is the jewel of the Sun International crown. Situated at a working harbour in the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town, the Table Bay Hotel has views of the majestic Table Mountain as a backdrop. This 5-star hotel offers luxury accommodation and a beautiful view of Cape Town. It was opened by Nelson Mandela in 1997 and has been named one of the top Leading Hotels in the World. It provided the perfect setting for celebrating not only the Theme of Travel, but also the majesty of Cape Town, a fitting way to acknowledge South African bloggers who continue to market this magnificent city.

About the Lawrence Anthony Earth Organisation:

The awards served as a fundraising platform for the Lawrence Anthony Earth Organization NPC 2004/026715/08 with proceeds going to their multi-media youth education program. The Lawrence Anthony Earth Organization makes learning about nature and science fun through multi-media classes given by an experienced teacher and research scientist Sayomi Tasaki through Video content related to the curriculum per age group.

The Lawrence Anthony Earth Organisation is a natural sciences project which brings an interactive audio-visual teaching methodology to South Africa’s youth. The stimulating project seeks to inform the youth on vital earth matters which are influencing the collective environmental consciousness. The project encourages the understanding of human impacts and the levels of interdependency from all beings within ecosystems. The Earth, Water Planet’s project empowers young students with the knowledge of how significant their choices are in their ability to build a brighter, sustainable future of the preservation of natural resources and all life on the planet. The Lawrence Anthony Earth Organisation is a non-profit organisation dedicated to reversing the dwindling spiral of plant and animal kingdoms and the environment through education and action (www.earthorganization.org/our-organization.)

With my warm thanks for the encouragement to keep following my travel, writing and photography dream. I will continue to do my very best to bring interesting stories from around the world, to you.

The Incidental Tourist is a Personal Travel Blog of a conscious traveller with a deep love for Africa, its people and the environment.

Here I bring you narratives, stories, video and photographs from my travels around the globe, including accounts of gorilla trekking in Uganda, tree planting in Zambia and turtle rescue in Kenya, accommodation and restaurant reviews, as well as details of the conservation efforts that I support.

A self proclaimed earth advocate and beauty seeker, I invite you to join me and share in my love of sustainable travel – and the rich offerings of our beautiful world.